Sex Journalism 101
Posted By jss on October 13, 2009
You would think that back in the ’60s and ’70s when, according to legend, sexual mores were looser than ever before or since, reams of newsprint would have been devoted to sexual advice.
But no. There was pretty much no such thing unless you want to count Penthouse Forum or The Playboy Advisor; and the former was more about sexual escapades while the latter had as much to do with mixing perfect highballs as it did about sex.
And you still can’t find sex advice in mainstream newspapers. Sure, every alternative weekly has one. Glossy magazines have 999 new ways to turn him (or her) on every month! (Does anyone know how often those have been recycled and rewritten?)
But college newspapers are where you find sex advice columnists, writing on cutting edge topics such as whether swallowing is a must for oral sex.
OK, yes, I know. That’s California, and that is where college sex columns really got going — in the ’90s. But there are more than 200 college newspaper sex columnists all across the country now, enough for The Nation to call it “A Movement.”
Which I think is great, and it fits right in with the narrative of Into Temptation. Except for one thing:
There aren’t enough sex columnist jobs out there for all these kid sex columnists coming out of school. And there *should* be. Newspapers are dying, in part, because they have almost no relevance to anyone under 35. You’d think at some point they’d try dumping “Dear Margo” for Mustafa “Will Write for Sex” Shaikh …
Or me.
But they won’t. They’d rather die.
"Into Temptation" is a usually-but-not-always safe-for-work forum about evolving social-sexual networks and how they have changed and are changing lives. It will also loosely chronicle the research, writing and publication, I hope in 2011, of a book by the same name.
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